Devices and Desires by Kate Hubbard

Author:Kate Hubbard [Hubbard, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

15.

Mocking and Mowing

‘My riches they talk of are in other men’s purses’, wrote Shrewsbury to Thomas Baldwin plaintively.1 The Earl’s expenses were huge, as were his debts, but so was his income from rents and sales, estimated at £10,000 a year in the 1580s. Like many rich men, he believed himself to be less rich than he actually was, and there was nothing he liked less than parting with money. Shrewsbury was mean and Bess and his children suffered for it. Gilbert Talbot in particular was constantly in debt and constantly applying to his father for relief. In 1585, the Earl gave him £1,000, which all, including the Queen, saw as a cause for celebration. Sir Christopher Hatton, with no sons of his own, felt that Gilbert could be ‘a comfortable staff in your old years’ and deserved some help.2 Burghley, who did have a ‘son or two’, agreed and repeatedly urged Shrewsbury to deal generously with Gilbert.

Burghley and Shrewsbury were friends of old and united by their ‘joint enemy’, gout. They exchanged reports and commiserations, suggested remedies, sent soothing ointments, and in Burghley’s case, offered the use of Burghley House, which was on ‘drier soil’ than Sheffield.* Both were sometimes unable to write at all, so crippled were their hands, but as Burghley put it touchingly, ‘I pray you make more account of my heart than my hands.’3 ‘I am as lonely as an owl’, claimed Burghley. This was no doubt true enough of Burghley the public figure, but privately he was a devoted husband and a humane and kindly father: ‘we fathers must take comfort in our children, to see and provide for them to live agreeable to our comforts’. Debt, he told the Earl, was ‘a cancer growing’, and without relief, Gilbert’s estate would simply be ‘eaten with burden of interest’. ‘No deed’, he thought, was ‘more charitable than to help a man out of a deep pit of debt, wherein the longer he shall be the deeper the pit will be’. And it would only take ‘a small portion’ of Shrewsbury’s ‘favour and purse’ to relieve his son. He knew that the Earl saw Gilbert as in league with Bess, but he, Burghley, believed that in actuality Gilbert had ‘worked for reconciliation’, and besides, he could hardly be blamed for seeing Bess, given that she was his wife’s mother.4

Far from abiding by the Queen’s order, Shrewsbury continued to make trouble, carrying on his suits against Bess’s servants and sons, and stirring up her Derbyshire tenants. Both he and Bess came to court during the spring and summer of 1585, anxious to further their cases. Bess lodged in Chancery Lane, and, as Henry Talbot reported to Shrewsbury, she, together with William, Charles and Mary Talbot, attended ‘very diligently at Court’, where they commanded ‘little respect’ (this may well have been a case of telling the Earl what he wanted to hear).5 By October, Bess was back at Wingfield, where, according to the order, she was based (she had the use of Wingfield for her lifetime, under her marriage settlement).

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